Browsing by Author "Pere, Taina Tuuli"

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Identifying and developing online business opportunities in a large corporation
(2013) Pere, Taina Tuuli
School of Science | Master's thesis
This study examines how a large and established corporation can identify and develop online business opportunities. The primary objective of the study is to construct a framework called the online business opportunity development process, which helps large and established corporations identify online business opportunities within a particular consumer market, screen and evaluate them, and develop them into viable business opportunities with a business model that has been validated to the extent that an investment decision can be made. The secondary objective of the study is to help a large media group find attractive opportunities in the growing Finnish health and wellness market using the online business opportunity development process. The study follows a constructive approach to solve the following research problem: How can a large and established corporation identify and evaluate online business opportunities within a given consumer market and find a viable business model for the most promising opportunities? The problem is approached by conducting a literature review to construct a process framework. The framework is also iterated in interviews and discussions with strategy experts working in the case company. Finally, the process framework is implemented and tested in practice in the case company. The study shows that the online business opportunity development process works well in systematically identifying and evaluating online business opportunities within a given market. Furthermore, the study identifies several online business ideas within the health and wellness market that might pose attractive opportunities for the case company. It also creates a preliminary business case for one of these ideas and provides tools and methods for completing the business case that could unfortunately not be fully analyzed due to time constraints. I believe that the online business opportunity development process can well be applied also in other large corporations that wish to find new online business opportunities. The study contributes to existing literature by filling multiple gaps. First of all, corporate venturing literature tends to take a rather high-level, strategic approach to venturing, providing few practical insights and frameworks that the subordinates of strategy-level managers could use to actually conduct the steps necessary for finding corporate venturing opportunities and turning them into viable businesses. This study helps fill this gap by supplementing corporate venturing literature with insights from two more practice-oriented literature streams: the lean startup approach and new product development. Second, corporate venturing literature is largely written from a traditional plan-driven perspective which relies on general management principles and ignores the differences between new ventures and mature organizations. This study helps correct this by supplementing corporate venturing literature with insights from the LSA. Third, despite of the proliferation of online business in today's world, corporate venturing literature is mostly written without giving any special consideration to the peculiarities of online business. This study helps fill this gap by focusing specifically on online business opportunities. Fourth, corporate venturing literature also falls short of providing process frameworks covering all the steps of a business opportunity development process. The online business opportunity development process constructed in this study fills this gap. Finally, this study also contributes to research on the lean startup approach, which is still very limited in general and even more so in the context of large and established corporations.